The past decade has seen the rapid emergence of multi-media data transmitted across networks, and particularly the transmission of digital video, to provide services such as video-on-demand, digital television broadcasts, and video content distribution. Digital video, however, contains an enormous amount of data in its raw or uncompressed state, making video compression both necessary and enabling for the delivery of video content. Further, content providers, publishers, or broadcasters need to convert, combine and send, or multiplex, multiple channels of compressed video data into a single output stream with a fixed bit rate in real-time or near real-time. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for systems, methods, and computer program products to optimally convert between encoding formats while allocating a fixed number of bits among a single or multiple channels of multi-media data.